Horizontal Culture & Practices

We are a collaborative, manager-of-one organization embracing horizontal practices, and part of the self-managing teams movement. Outside of work, we don’t have people who supervise our performance, yet all make important decisions for ourselves and for people we care about. We can do much better for ourselves and each other by building a company that supports autonomous and mutually supportive individuals, who self-manage while working as a team.

We use horizontal practices because we believe in treating adults like adults. The person doing the job has the most information about whether they’re doing the best job they can do. No one else has thought as deeply about what they are doing as they themselves have. So we want that person to make the key decisions about their own work. At the same time, what one person does affects the success of teammates who depend on them. So, we have found and created practices that help each person balance working autonomously with meeting the needs of those whose work depends on them.

In this section of the handbook, you will see some of our horizontal practices for our self-managing organization.

What is all this about?

Most people believe that traditional hierarchical arrangements of power are necessary to “manage performance:” someone “above” you must hold you accountable your job performance. The history behind this idea proposes a mechanistic understanding of workers that fails to account for people’s intrinsic motivation.

In our experience, the best, most satisfying work happens when you take ownership of the work. We think hierarchical management is at best unnecessary for success and at worst creates a dehumanizing culture, especially for women and other workers underrepresented in tech. So we’re asking no one to be a supervisor, and everyone to be a manager-of-one.

In fact, companies ranging from WL Gore, makers of GoreTex, and Haier, the world’s largest appliance maker to startups like Buffer and boutique specialists like August have already embraced non-traditional management (some, for decades!). Is it the norm? Not yet! But have you heard the rumblings about the “future of work”” and “self-leadership”?? ;-)

Basics of Horizontal Self-Management at Cadence

  1. You don’t report to a supervisor. You have to do the things that a supervisor would have done for you, like keep yourself accountable and evaluate your performance.
  2. You make “Safe to Try” decisions. If it will affect someone else’s work, you get their input. You iterate on the plan until you agree that it is safe to try.
  3. Decisions that affect the team go through a consent process where the team agrees on what is safe to try.
  4. If you fail, fail in public, so we can all help and learn. Mistakes don’t make you a bad person (but hiding it might kill the company).
  5. Be greedy in asking for help, verbose when struggling, and generously honest in gifting feedback.

Please feel free to bring your own perspective to the discussion in the #horizontal-culture Slack channel.

Guiding Principles for Horizontal Culture

  1. We embrace clarity, especially for difficult discussions. We have short toes, so no one is choosing to obfuscate for fear of someone else losing face.

  2. We acknowledge that people are dynamic: their interests and strengths change over time. We make room for growth, whether that’s at Cadence OneFive or maybe even beyond.

  3. We support the whole person, and we work together to get the job done. Help is gifted, not transactional (i.e. not favors to be returned).

  4. We don’t coerce. We negotiate and compromise. We use horizontal management practices and come to agreement on what action to take, possibly after some healthy conflict. We allow for the possibility of changing direction based on new data, and we test for success.

To build a team that can work autonomously and collaboratively,

  1. We hire people who put team success first by supporting autonomous ways of working. Everyone on our team embraces our mission. We lift each other up. We communicate, communicate, communicate.

  2. We hire people who dig in and become expert and thereby are increasingly flexible in mindset Generalists and specialists who are motivated by learning and curiosity are welcome.

  3. We hire people who assume best intentions and give themselves and others permission to fail, recover, and learn!